The potato paradox: Farmers can't sell their harvests before they rot, yet 21 tons of donated spuds vanish in minutes

“Pretty much as soon as we opened up the market this morning, people were coming in with their bags and carts, their trucks even,” said Caroline Hissong, the communications manager for We Don’t Waste, in an interview with the Denverite. ”It’s honestly really amazing to see… the community showed up.”

The event and others like it highlight an international potato paradox going on right now. Potato supply is way up, leaving farmers with thousands of tons of tubers they can’t sell. Potato prices are consequently low, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

But when farmers give away their crops, which would head for a landfill otherwise, people quickly clean them out.

Here’s what’s behind both sides of the phenomenon.

Behind Potato Palooza is a “potato flood” that’s leaving potato farmers worldwide with huge surpluses

Europe is currently going through a “Kartoffel-Flut”, or potato flood, largely caused by record German potato crop yields.

This has left German farmers with thousands of pounds of potatoes they can’t sell — and it’s impacting potato farmers in the US and Canada, even though their yields are slightly down.

“We were just getting to the point where we were having to discard all these potatoes, dump them on the ground, or use them to feed cattle or whatever,” said Idaho farmer Kent Sutton in an interview with Cowboy State Daily.

Sutton says that he’s still getting demand for potatoes from restaurants and grocery stores, two markets that require potatoes to be a certain size to buy them. The rest, Sutton says, he sends to dehydration plants to process.

Unfortunately, dehydrators just aren’t interested, likely because of the decreased demand for their products.

For farmers and nonprofits in Germany and the US alike, the solution is to give the extra product away. So far, that strategy is working out.

The event and others like it helped families afford potatoes that would just go to a landfill otherwise

While potato growers are suffering from too much supply, families across the US are dealing with spiking grocery prices. Grocery prices have increased by 33% over the last seven years; comparatively, they only rose by 6.4% in the 7 ½ years before 2019.

According to the Denver government, over one third of adults who live in the city have skipped or cut meals in the last year due to lack of funds. That likely inspired the huge turnout for Potato Palooza.

“We’re going to have potatoes for a good amount of time. I’m really happy about it,” said Monika Gurung, who attended the event, to the Denverite. “I’m so grateful… It just helps a lot, especially with inflation.”